New quests for discovering games!We’re pleased to announce our new “Game Exploration Quests” for the Explorer Class. Now you can earn rewards and achievements as you explore and discover new games to play!

Dedicated page for game exploration quests
Learn everything you need to know about how the Game Exploration Quests work and see which group of games are “explorable” for the month.

The link to this page can be found in the drop-down menu of the “Quests” tab in the main navigation and is called “Game Exploration Quests.”

I regards to the play requirement, I also agree with Granny and bobb33z3r. I enjoy learning about a variety of different games, but from a time and resources standpoint, playing each game on the explore list is extremely difficult. I appreciate the opportunity and incentive to research games that I wouldn’t normally try, but I just won’t have access to several of these games.

As a related question, I feel like I’m missing something on part of these quests. Currently, the requirement is ten steps. One can come from the hourglass, up to three from reviews, two from tips, one each from rules, website, and video, plus one from following and one from playing. Doesn’t that mean there are only 11 possible steps? So if a video or ruleset (or both) is missing, the quest may not be achievable. Are there other ways to explore that I’m missing?

I’m with Granny on this, I think the goal should be to foster exploration of new games you may want to play/own, not necessarily HAVE to play/own. Not every game is everyone’s cup of tea, but by fostering exploring, you’re fostering gamers to learn about what’s out there that they might like.

I’m going to have to say “no” on requiring the users to have played a game to get the exploration points. I use reviews, tips, videos, etc. to decide if I want to purchase a game. I’d guess most of what I read is on games I do NOT have. I’d like the option to explore a game… but if I decided not to purchase it, I wouldn’t want to be penalized after spending time looking into it. That’s just my two cents. It could make the exploration feel more like a waste of time rather than the intended goal of fostering exploration.

I’m torn over the needing to play to complete the exploration. At first glance it seems the right decision to me, but it also means that I am unlikely to complete any of the quests in this batch as I own none of the games (and neither do any of the people I am likely to game with in the near future). Oh well.

I have just explored my 1st 5 games and did not have to play to complete them which was just as well because I had already posted my plays update as of tosay and I chose games to explore that I had already played a lot as I wanted to get a feel for how much help the process is for new games I am unfamiliar with, and so far no problems.

Currently, it looks like there are a maximum of 13 exploration steps you can complete (hourglass, 4 reviews, 3 tips, web page, rulebook, video, follow, and play). Maybe videos and plays give credit multiple times; I haven’t tried them yet (hourglass does not).

But it looks like if you make it so that you can’t get steps for grading tips without playing the game at least once, then there are only a maximum of 9 steps for games you haven’t played–and some games don’t even have all 9 of those available. Since you need 10 steps to finish the quest, that will make the quest impossible to complete without playing the game. So Jon’s #2 suggestion implicitly includes the #1 suggestion unless we add some more things you can do to complete steps (or reduce the number of steps required).

In fact…I’m guessing that the videos, the rulebook link, and the official page link could potentially all be absent from a single game. In which case that would be only 10 possible steps available to be completed for that game, including playing it. So under the current system, playing the game may already be required in some cases! (Though none of the current explorable games.)

Maybe we should think about adding more possible steps, or slightly reducing the required number of steps to explore a game…

I’m with @Millhouse on this one. I haven’t actually played any of the games on the list, but I found the exploration quest was very useful as it got me to take some time to check out whether or not it is something I want to play in the future. If you make playing the game as a requirement, I doubt I would have taken the time to explore.

I like suggestion #2 – I think rating tips an optional step is good, as long as there is still enough other things you can do to complete the exploration without it. One obvious option is to add more videos and give credit for each video watched. The number one thing I found useful in exploring was watching the videos.

Suggestion #3 is fine.

Another thing that came to mind about rating reviews and tips – why not give the option to “favorite” a review or tip and limit the number of times you can do this to once per day (maybe more at higher levels). I think this extra level of differentiation could really help to separate the just ok reviews with the stellar reviews on the site and could also count as another exploration step.

The problem with your 1st idea, at least with me, is there is no way I could play all of those game and be a part of this quest. While I agree that playing a game is truly exploring a game, there is a big investment in both money and time. And not only the time to play the game, but a lot of the games I play as new plays are at the game stores game nights, which means an investment in a night to get away.

Isnt that already separated some from those who write reviews and tips? What if there was a second tier of Exploring, where you MASTER a game by writing a review, tip, rating it, and so on?

We’re getting some great feedback. Now that you’ve had a chance to try the system, let us know your thoughts about

1. Making playing the game a requirement – The principle here would be that you can’t REALLY know the game until you’ve played it. I personally really like this requirement. We want to make the exploration a fun experience and part of what makes something fun is having it be a challenge. Yes, there will be cheaters who lie about having played a game, but the moral incentive for not lying should deter most people.

2. Making tips an optional step that only counts towards exploration after you’ve played the game – The principle is that the tips don’t really tell you much until after you’ve played it (and yes, it could be retroactive such that if you read tips and then play the game, you’d get the credit for the tips you’ve graded after you indicate that you’ve played the game)

3. Allowing you to follow an explorable game in spite of the normal follow limit – Most people are following and then unfollowing right away due to the current follow limit. The limit on following is mostly a server-load issue, so to still have a limit we might be to make the limit be based on the normal follow limit + the total number of currently explorable games. We could also make notifications disappear after 2 weeks instead of after 1 month.

@Jon So, I tried using the “Not Graded Yet” feature for tips on Android, and…the only ones not graded are ones I submitted, and I can’t grade my own. I can’t complete the final step to explore Android! Oh well.

I think game guides would be great. Do you plan on having all gamers participate? For Gateway Games, we could all provide our top 5, and from those you could put together a list of maybe 20 or so to vote on. We’d all vote, and then you could make the list out of the top 10… or something like that. There might be some games that we are using as “Gateway” that might surprise you. Takaneko is working well for me right now… and King of Tokyo seems to pull in people quite well. Carcassonne is still a classic though.

Then the problem is that unless I unfollow games I am genuinely interested in I can’t do exploration quests. I’m already at my maximum allowed and have about another half dozen or more I would be following if I could.

Hopefully this will entice people to post more content for all of the games chosen for Exploration (now that people are learning more about them, hopefully they’ll be trying them and letting everyone know what they learn).

This is an interesting addition. I have explored as much as I can I think. Only the Uncharted Board Game and Airlines Europe left to explore — but not enough options to complete the exploration of each.

@spizio, We realize that for certain games the number of steps you can choose from is limited, and it would be tempting to do the follow to complete then unfollow scenario. It’s allowable under the current system, but not recommended.

These exploration quests are high on the “honor system” side of things. This is another reason why we aren’t making every game on the site explorable, the temptation to game the system would be very high.

We hope that in the end these quests can be a fun and unique way to aid you in game discovery!

I’m already following the maximum number of games for my level. What happens if I follow one then complete the quest. Then unfollow the game after the quest is completed? I know if you unfollow before completing the quest it will not count. Yes I realize this is really gamey and not in the intended way but I’m currently stck at following 15 games and have no reasonable option for advancing that quest to the next level. The only source of xp available is clicking the hour glass on game pages which I found out today is apparently limited per day.